"When the picture is too strong, you cannot look at it too much. When the picture is too perfect, you forget about it."

Abruzzo is quite well known in Europe, because it’s the last really wild place in Italy.

It’s a good combination, because you can visit the Colosseum in Rome in the morning and then watch a bear in the afternoon, and have an amazing dinner at night in a five hundred year old village.

Invisible signature

What most people come and ask me is, "How do you somehow manage to have an invisible signature to your pictures?"

It doesn’t mean that [the pictures] are better or worse than others, but it means that they are really [mine].

It comes from a very strong inner vision.

It’s surprisingly fed and nurtured by any input you place into your head. It could be music, it could be food, or your favorite football team.

All your past, all your background, all your daily experiences somehow, if you manage to metabolize them, flow into the way you approach photography.

ALIVE

I was working almost ten years of my life on Apennine chamois. It's a kind of mountain goat which is endemic; it lives only here in the Apennines.

One idea was to photograph them with the moonlight. The chamois were in a line, and I was photographing with the light of distant villages, very distant villages in the back. There came a haze that turned all pink. The wind was moving a cloud that turned completely blue. So, the situation was well beyond my wildest dreams.”

And that picture says it all.

Affect on life

Another time I looked into the forest, and I saw running toward me a wolf pup with the fresh cut head of a deer. This connection of the death and life was really like ecology in one picture.

In that moment I had a burst; I had a blush on my cheeks, and when I walked back I was crying, really crying, because of this huge emotion.

One of my childhood dreams was to photograph the fennec fox (Sahara Desert).

This picture shows the difficult conditions in which both the animal and the kid live. This kid is trying to sell the fennec fox that he caught in the wild illegally.

This image was a 2014 winner in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Advice

When the picture is too strong, you cannot look at it too much. When the picture is too perfect, you forget about it. You have to find a picture that you can read in layers.

Have a strong drive for the subject.

Learn as much as you can about your subject, more than about the camera or the latest thing in Photoshop. The nature part takes ages. Be patient.

According to legendary wildlife photographer Jim Brandenburg, Bruno's latest book "Time for Wolves has been crafted with the delicate eye of an artist, the hand of a seasoned writer and the analytical mind of a scientist."

I bought a Pentax K1000 about twenty years ago. At the time I was in my first year of law school. After I got the camera I realized then that I had just made a huge $100,000 mistake. Not on the camera, mind you, on my legal education.

I was hooked right away, and it very quickly morphed into a hobby. Then, before I knew it, it was a passion, and then once I worked about eight years as a lawyer to pay off my law school debt, it became a career.

Now I just call it a lifestyle. I really can't say that it’s something that I do; it is what I am.

ALIVE

I sleep, and then there’s photography; that’s about it.

There are a lot of times when I’m in the back country, when I’m by myself, and I’m in the wilderness photographing that I really feel alive. I feel connected with the landscape, with nature, with my surroundings, and with my subject matter.

Sharing the experience

I think a lot of people who consume photography are looking for a vicarious experience. They are looking to put themselves in the photographer's shoes.

The picture can bring them a fair portion of the way there, but I think that words can bring them all the way. Words really bring that experience to them.

Visual flow

There are different ways of seeing and explaining how art composition works, but there are no rules.

The rule of thirds is a perfect example. It’s something that I think Kodak basically invented. It’s a nice simplification of other principals, and that’s what makes it so attractive to photographers; it’s easy to use.

You can just look at a scene and mentally divide it into thirds. It’s pretty simple. But there is no magic to it, and it may work every now and then, but it’s not going to work for everything. So, I decided I really wanted to delve deep into the subject and try to uncover some core principles of design, that were informing these rules that people are repeating over and over again, and trying to give people a deeper understanding of what's going on.

In October 2014, I went to Alaska to photograph polar bears. That was incredible. You get out there and you would see as many as 25 or 30 polar bears at a time. It was just amazing.

You get out there on the water, and basically the bears are on this spit of land that sticks out, and the boats can get right up to the bears as they walk along the shore. There was one point I was about ten feet away from a mother and her two cubs, in the boat. It was really incredible being that close to an animal that, if it wanted to, could do a lot of damage to me.

Image over your mantle

One of the images I have [hanging at my house] is one of a mountain gorilla. I photographed the mountain gorilla through a screen of leaves, so I got really close to a bush, and I found a small gap in the leaves. Shooting with wide open aperture and a small telephoto lens, the leaves all blurred out. So I like the image because it’s kind of a mysterious presentation. I wanted to show how mysterious and magical the experience is with these gorillas.

Affect on life

When you put a camera lens in front of your face, when you are creative with exposure and composition, you’re really distorting people’s vision of reality. You’re distorting the real world around you, and you’re showing, hopefully a distortion that’s gonna be artistic and compelling.

To me that is the unique beauty of photography as an art form. It is this ability to take reality and every so slightly twist it to the artist’s whim, and present something that people haven’t seen before.

Advice

Push your boundaries. Don’t just shoot what you want to shoot.

Personally, I try to shoot things that I normally wouldn’t shoot. Even though I’ve primarily been a landscape and wildlife photographer, I now try to push the boundary and do some street photography and travel photography here and there.

I try things that I haven’t done before, because it’s a really great way just to practice your creativity, to hone your creative vision. So I tell people, "Just get behind the camera as much as possible." Whenever you have free time, fuel your passion for photography. Get out there and shoot.

Leave a comment for Ian below. For more of Ian Plant, see IanPlant.com

I’m alive most when I’m out photographing either deep in canyons of mother earth or up on the tops of peaks.

>>> Click image above to see David's interview.

My first camera was an Ikoflex. I started in black and white. Then, it developed into color, of course, and then I went to a Linhof 4x5 large format. My earliest photo was taken in 1953. It’s a black and white from up on Hunt’s Mesa in Monument Valley.

Early influences

Coming out of art center school of design in Los Angles, I was really touched by many of the stars like Brett Weston, Ernst Haas in color, Cartier Bresson with 35mm, and of course Ansel set the pace for photography.

What’s most exciting for me is working the edges between seasons—running winter snow well into spring with flowers below. Working the Autumn coloring, and beautiful trees.

Going into the winter season, these changes and the edges have been the most fascinating. And of course, the brooding moods, the great moods and the drama. Most all the time is always in pursuit of that next drama.

Light

It always comes around to light. The real finishing touch is working with the light. I love sidelight, backlight. The one I really enjoy the most is ambient light now—quieter light, wet light.

When it rains for instance, or you’re in a fog. I just love fog work. Working in the fog everything changes. You get mystery. Magic comes to it, and that’s where the ambient light is.

Its not contrasty, and I love the subtlety. You can work with details. You get form, which you have to place and work with light and shade, so that it’s agreeable or enjoyable at least. You get a harmony in the image.

One of my favorites is Big Bend National Park in Texas—its rock, deserts, plant life, animal life. It’s very wild, and you get a sense of wildness. It’s beautiful. I love to get the feeling of harmony in there.

There are the bristlecone locations. I love the airy quality between sky and earth with the trees reaching up in between, they really touch on both of them. I mean, even the earth around the root systems is exposed.

The root systems are exposed, and yet the top of the tree is alive and reaching into the sky.

Affect on life

It really has brought us all together. It has occupied much of our lives. With Marc for instance, they went on trips with me, just like I did with my dad and mom. By osmosis, ya know, he picked it up and has become very good.

The Brownie Target 620. It was roll film. You know, a little box you looked down into, and you could see straight ahead.

[My passion] grew over time. I kept on having fairly profound experiences

Profound experience

I didn’t know who Edward Weston was. I went to the museum. I just walked around a corner and saw Edward Weston’s photograph of a cabbage leaf on a wall. Without even thinking, I swear this leaf took a breath. It seemed to expand... like a lung.

I was frozen to the spot. It was one of those conscious moments. There was something that came from Edward Weston, to his image, to me.

It changed the course of my life.

ALIVE

It’s been over 50 years of being seriously involved in photography. I eat, sleep, everything. I mean, I have dreams about it.

Affect on life

I can see light reflectance values. I see contrast where people see subject matter. Honestly, I see subject matter second. First I see the density of the shadows cast by light.

I see differently.

Advice

If someone loves photography, they should know in their heart that they can do it. Never to question, “Can I do it?” Photography is not a competitive sport. There are a lot of organizations where they sort of compete. That is not my thing, at all.

It’s a path for personal growth. That’s what photography is. It’s discovering who you really are.

Follow on Instagram!

Sage advice from @macstonephoto "In high school my friends and I would come up with random adventures to fill our weekends: caving in abandoned quarries, climbing water towers and camping in our local wetlands. The hunger for something unpredictable and something meaningful became a real driving force for me, even today, many years later. The photo series is an homage to that time and perhaps an affirmation to my inner 15 year old that I haven’t forgotten the rewards of spontaneity and the simple pleasure of sleeping under the stars."
#milkyway

"Winter made a spectacular entrée in the #Apennines and after an intense snowfall, a gorgeous white blanket is covering everything. Snow is the perfect background for wildlife photography but opportunities for great shots are always rare since the mountain wildlife gets more scarce in this season. Only a few resident species keep roaming the empty landscape.
I still remember the emotion of the encounter with this magnificent red fox on a frosty morning. The way its bright red popped out against the bluish shadow of beech trees was really a dream come true! It is for preserving such magic moments that I love photography."
👉 Follow @brunodamicisphoto for more! #wildlifewednesday

"There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
—
This is one of several photos that I took at this amazing spot. After walking down a challenging trail and traversing a stream in several locations, you reach a narrow slot canyon with walls of multi-colored sandstone, reflecting and glowing with the ever changing light. The stream and waterfalls get louder as you get deeper into the canyon. —
Please take care of this precious area. Drive slowly through town, pick up any trash you see, leave nothing but footprints, and go in small groups. The trail is eroding from foot traffic and you can find trash in the stream and on the trail. Unfortunately, you can find the same situation in just about every wilderness area. True adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts have a great respect for God's creations. —
Let's all work together to help keep our natural resources pristine for our generation... and future generations."
👉 @larrymarshallphotography

"The Milky Way rises over 7,439m Pobeda Peak, the highest in the Tien Shan mountains and farthest north 7,000m peak on the planet. Clear and cold temperatures were perfect for night photography at Khan Tengri/Pobeda Basecamp."
👉 by @dodrillphoto

Diamond Beach Aurora Borealis
👉 by @snorri.gunnarsson —
Some things are almost too surreal to be real. But that's just Iceland 🇮🇸 #iceland #ig_iceland